A Copper Kiss
by Vacancy
Summary: Oneshot. Just another one of those What-Could-Have-Been stories.


**I knoww, I knowww.**

**It's just another 'What if?' story. I get it. Okay? If you're interested in reading it and are going to flame me for unoriginality . . .**

**. . . Wow. Get a life, man. **

**Anyway, I just wrote this and liked it. -shrug- R&R, my loves!**

Disclaimer: I own nothing but fun-filled OOC fanfictions.

**-x-**

Face buried in white rose blossoms, Bella Swan wandered the familiar trek of the graveyard path. For some reason, the sight of white-gray tombstones filled her with the thought of what could be, things that had flitted just out of her touch when she took a wrong turn somewhere in her life. It made her spine shiver and her fingers tremble.

At least, she had felt that way about the cool graveyard until Sara died.

Poor Renée, suffering like that. Bella off to Forks until she returned to Phoenix for college, leaving her husband happy but her life so confusing and scary, her wandering without any purpose but keeping house—and the light coming in the name of a baby—just two years old, she had died while visiting her half-sister.

She was buried here, in the spongy ground of Forks, Washington. Her mother had found it too painful to keep her daughter so close—but Bella visited her once a month. On sunny days, when the temporary chill of Forks' eternal winter lifted.

Bella liked to read other tombstones. If she had extra, she'd lay a flower on one of the fresher graves—but not too many. Had it been anyone elses' grave but the baby's', Bella would have tucked a flower next to every name in the yard she felt sympathy for, leaving one for the intended departed soul, but it was the nature of babies to be resentful and greedy, so she restrained herself.

Jacob had been supposed to meet her under the arch of the graveyard, but as usual, he was late. He was always getting distracted when he was down at the reservation, and Bella didn't like the feeling she got when he casually sidestepped her begging questions as to where he had been. He was her boyfriend, after all. It was unnecessary to ask him to come along on this somber occasion—Jacob liked fun and action and laughter—but she was afraid of her half-sisters' grave, still so fresh and new. Even though she visited it every month, the grief and dread were always the same.

Deciding that it was best to get it over and done with and save Jacob the sadness, Bella rounded the sharp turn that led to Saras' path side grave.

She heard murmuring from another mourner as she reached her sisters' grave, but thought it would be rude to look at someone trying to speak to the dead. She couldn't help her ears, however, and they caught a bit of the words before they were knocked away by the wind.

"—and I told your mother that I would try to save your life, but I didn't, Edward. I had your grave moved so that you could stay with me, when we moved here. Esme thought it would be best, and I agreed. I don't know why I feel so responsible, when you were so far gone—."

It was a males' voice, and a terribly attractive one too. Bella ignored it, sight falling on the little plaque above the baby's grave.

**SARA TIFFANY SWAN**

**Beloved daughter and sister.**

**2006-2008**

Perhaps hearing her approach, the other man muttered a goodbye to Edward and rose, and Bella raised her eyes to him and smiled sympathetically, though it morphed to seductive when she saw how mind-shatteringly beautiful he was. Her eyes remained stuck to him as he left her vision, leaving blond-haired imprints left in Bella's mind.

"I miss you, little sister," she murmured, kneeling by the plaque—she felt resentful, and not for the first time, that her mother had not purchased a tombstone, a small statue, anything that she could touch and hug and call a memorial of her baby sister other than a burnished copper name-plate that would fade to unintelligible engravings covered by wind-swept grass in time. Bella substituted this, laying on the grass, pressing her cheek to the cool metal

The thought of so many bodies lying very much the same way below, dolled up just as pretty as Bella was to go no where but down, made her stomach clench, but she whispered against the surface anyway, her lips brushing over it minutely as she polished it with her sleeve.

"Mom sends her regards, and I brought you white roses—they had these at your Christening, remember? You looked so pretty in that white lace dress, like a little baby doll, my little baby doll . . ."

She continued to speak to the unresponsive ground, feeling, oddly, that the dozen months spent in heaven had aged her sister so that she heard her like an equal and was listening to her words, thinking about Bella and Renee and Charlie and even Jacob as she spoke their names, telling of stories and how things were going until her voice cracked with tears.

"I miss you so much, babydoll," she whispered in goodbye, her tears puddling on the surface, making it a salty kiss she pressed to the metal.

After Bella recovered—understanding even more than the moment before why the beautiful man had fled when she approached, she walked over to the grave he had been speaking to, where nothing but a tombstone lay, thatched over with grass and bare of flowers.

**Edward Anthony Masen **

**1901-1918**

**Rest In Peace, to never wake**

What an awful thing to put on a grave. Bella fetched a rose and a sprig of white Queen Anne's Lace and tucked it next to the weathered headstone, feeling as though she owed to the poor boy, who had died just three years less than she had lived. The warm morning had adopted a goosebump-worthy chill.

And as she walked from the graveyard, her heart was full of that awful what could have been and her mouth disgustingly metallic with her copper kiss.


End file.
